


Fire and Ice

by anythingbutplatonic



Category: Glee
Genre: Killer Frost/Firestorm AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-03 19:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4111822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: “He used to say that we were like fire and ice.”</p><p>I challenged Jen whatstheproblembaby on Tumblr to a fluff vs. angst fic showdown and my contribution to the angst side of the competition is a Killer Frost/Firestorm AU based on the DC Comics superhero/supervillain couple. I’ve taken some liberties with the original character concepts to make it work since this isn’t a sci-fi/fantasy story, strictly speaking.</p><p>Originally posted on Tumblr May 23rd 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Cold.

The first thing he registered was the cold; the kind of cold that’s bone-deep and seeps into every part of your body, making it too painful to move. The kind of cold that hurts, like burning yourself on a hot stove but worse, because at least if you burn yourself on something hot, you can run cold water over it and it’ll take the sting away. A cold burn can’t simply be remedied with heat; it doesn’t work that way.

Coming to his senses on the damp, rain-chilled stone of an alley somewhere in New York City, soaked through to the skin, the dye from his navy sweater running in rivulets down his wrists like blood, the only thing Kurt Hummel could think about was how cold he was, and whether he’d ever feel warm again.

***

It had happened almost completely by accident. 

For the past three days, he had been sleeping at night in the doorway of an empty bakery, the store long closed and the owners long gone. He had nothing except the clothes on his back and a small leather satchel, filled with all the meaningless paraphernalia of life as a young person in New York City; his cellphone, a few crumpled pages of sheet music, a half-eaten candy bar, a pair of hopelessly tangled earbuds, a few pens, a dog-eared book he had taken to reading on the subway onto campus every morning, a rotten brown apple core he had forgotten to throw out.

A squashed pack of matches, which had made him laugh without humour when he’d discovered it at the bottom of the satchel. He wouldn’t be needing those any more.

  
On one such lonely night huddled in the bakery doorway, under the chipped awning that (luckily) kept out most of the rain and wind, It happened. “It” being what had made Blaine realize that something had  _happened_  to him, something he couldn’t explain or describe, something terrible. Something  _wrong_.

He had been dozing off against the door of the bakery, knees drawn up under his chin, when someone had kicked him none too gently and a rough voice had demanded, “Get up!”

Blinking sleepily, he had struggled into an upright position, mumbling, “What?”

“You heard me. This is my spot. Get your own.”

The person trying to apparently evacuate him was a man who looked to be in his mid-to-late twenties, with thick dark hair and a scruffy-looking beard obscuring most of the lower half of his face. His skin was oily in the little moonlight that penetrated Blaine’s line of vision, allowing him to see the man standing over him with a determined expression.

“I didn’t - I didn’t realize,” Blaine swallowed, his throat dry. “I thought - I’ve been here for three days. I didn’t think anyone else was using this space.”

It sounded less like he had been sleeping in a storefront doorway and more like he had stolen a prime parking spot in a supermarket lot.  But he didn’t have the energy nor the will to argue with the man.

Slowly, stretching out his stiff limbs, Blaine gathered up his satchel and jacket, trying not to think about the fact that he’d have to find someplace else to sleep tonight.

“Move faster!” the man ordered. “What are you, slow or somethin’?”

That made Blaine stop, fear creeping in where previously he had simply wanted to be as little of an inconvenience as possible.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, not wanting to cause trouble. He tried to speed up his movements, but his hands and feet wouldn’t cooperate. He stumbled, knees hitting the wood of the doorway painfully.

“I said  _move_!” the man roared, and his closed fist came into contact with Blaine’s jaw, knocking him clear out of the doorway and onto the sidewalk in front of the bakery, landing on the wet ground with a thud that sent pain shrieking up and down his body. 

His body pressed lengthwise along the damp sidewalk, Blaine shook with pain and rage - at the man, at himself, at the horrible situation he was in,  _homeless_  and getting beaten up by other homeless people for no reason other than the fact that he was trying to find a place to sleep that had, apparently, already been taken. Or so this man said. 

His jaw aching, Blaine staggered to his feet, tasting blood at the side of his mouth. He was still clutching the strap of his satchel, although half its contents had spilled out onto the ground when he fell; the apple core had bounced away and down a nearby drain. 

His grip on his satchel was so tight, his palms were burning with sweat and the ache of muscle and bone clenching around the unforgiving leather. But he didn’t relax his grip, and he didn’t move from where he stood, scared but daring his assailant to do something else. To hit him again. Or to grab the satchel from his hands and run off with it. Not that there was anything particularly valuable in it. 

The man slowly moved closer, almost swaggering, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. 

“You gonna run?” he taunted Blaine. “You gonna get out of here and leave me in peace?”

Blaine’s lips seemed to move without him consciously doing so; a voice that was foreign to his own ears, low and rough and, above all, angry, said, “ _No.”_

His own voice. His own lips moving. But at the same time, not him, either. It was something else, something rising up inside him that had been triggered by - what, exactly? The force of the man’s punch, perhaps, or the way he had ordered Blaine around as if he had a right to do so. But it rose within him nonetheless, a burning anger spreading through his bruised, aching body, something  _alive_  that set his blood boiling in his veins. 

“No?” the man laughed, harsh and grating. “ _No?_  You wanna come over here and say that to my face? You wanna look me in the eye and say that?”

Blaine didn’t. Instead, he stayed rooted to where he was, standing his ground, refusing to back down. 

This wasn’t going to end up like last time. It  _couldn’t_  end up like last time.

And then he realized that his satchel was -  _smoking_.

The burning, the rising tide of anger, the feeling of his blood singing with heat in his veins - it was coming from  _him_. 

Startled, he dropped the satchel, the strap falling to charred pieces on the ground. The sudden movement sent up a  _whoosh_  of smoke and the rush of air and then, where his hands had been moments ago, there were two plumes of gold-red fire, hot and getting hotter, casting his shadow along the ground and stunning his assailant into speechlessness. 

“What the-?” 

Blaine didn’t give him a chance to finish his sentence; on instinct, as if something deep within him had compelled him to do it, he balled his fist and made as if to throw an invisible object - and sent up a blazing ball of fire that struck the man squarely in the chest, eating away the material of his shirt with ease and burning his skin an angry, welted red.

Blaine didn’t hear the man’s screams, although he must have registered them in some part of his brain; most of his attention was focused on what the  _hell_  was happening to him, what it was that had made him like this, what it all meant, what it  _was_  -

The man surged forward, clutching his scalded chest with one hand, his free hand poised to take another swing at Blaine’s jaw; but Blaine didn’t give him a chance to land the punch, for he grabbed the man’s outstretched wrist and let the fire do its work, burning the tender skin of his wrist just as it had burned his wrist, turning the skin an angry, blistering red.

The man screamed and screamed, but Blaine didn’t let go. He kept tight hold of his wrist until the man eventually collapsed, panting, onto the damp ground, too dazed with pain to stand any more. 

“What the hell are you?” the man gasped, the fear evident in his voice. “What the hell kind of freak  _are_  you?”

“Stay away from me,” Blaine said, “and you’ll never have to find out.”

The coldness in his own voice surprised him. 

He snatched up his fallen satchel once more, and noticed that the fire had disappeared; all that was left was a telltale redness of his palms, as if he’d held them on a radiator for too long. If he really tried, he could smell the residual scent of smoke on the air. 

 _What the hell kind of freak_  are _you?_  

 _ **The kind you don’t want to mess with**_ , Blaine thought as he shrugged into his jacket and went in search of shelter once more. 


	2. Chapter 2

They called him The Burning Man. 

For weeks, now, Kurt had heard stories of a - well, a person with superhuman abilities. A person who could conjure fire at will, and use it for anything he wanted. No, not someone who could conjure fire - someone who  _became_  fire, all blazing oranges and reds and golds, someone who could turn into flame at the snap of fingers or the blink of an eye and burn everything and everyone in his path. 

He wouldn’t have been so inclined to believe it had he not wondered the same thing about himself. Not that he could conjure fire, but that he was -  _different_. That he also had some kind of power that he didn’t yet know the full extent of. 

It was crazy. It was  _crazy_. But this was New York, and all kinds of crazy things happened in New York. Supernatural humans weren’t that much of a stretch of the imagination, were they? 

Kurt thought about it as he sipped lukewarm coffee in a small diner a couple blocks from his apartment in Bushwick. It wasn’t the height of sophistication - the pink leather seats were cracked and torn, spilling yellowed stuffing, and the whole place smelled of stale coffee and bacon and toasting bagels - but it was homely and comfortable and, well, Kurt didn’t have anywhere else to go.

He’d arrived home about a week or so ago to find a red-lettered flyer taped to his front door.  _EVICTION NOTICE: You must vacate the property within 7 working days_. No explanation, no reason given for why he was being kicked out of the apartment he’d been living in for the last two years, just a “get out or else” stuck to his front door. Let it never be said that Bushwick had any class. 

So now he was homeless, his possessions packed into two suitcases and an old gym bag he’d used in high school, and he was trying to pretend like it wasn’t the end of the world but every time he thought,  _What am I going to do?_  an icy terror seemed to grip his insides, making his hands shake and his throat constrict painfully. 

It wasn’t the life he’d imagined he’d be living when he first arrived in New York. 

Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, he let himself be distracted by a conversation between two waitresses standing not too far away, refiling salt shakers. 

“Did you hear about that mugger who got torched down at Bryant Park the other night?”

“I know, totally crazy, right? But the ground was  _wet_. Soaked. There’s no way a fire would’ve caught in that place, it would’ve burned right out. Unless...”

“Do  _not_  say it was The Burning Man, Jess. He doesn’t exist. It’s a myth. Probably a rumour made up by some guy tweaked off his ass and seeing dragons in the street. You know the kind of stuff they push at the clubs. S’probably just an urban legend.”

“Then how did the guy burn to death, hmm?  _How?”_

Kurt made to swallow the last dregs of his coffee, but they were stone cold; grimacing, he pushed his cup away and took out a few dollar bills, enough to cover the cost of the coffee and a tip. He checked his wallet; he had fifty dollars. He knew he had a couple hundred more in his bank account. But in New York, even that amount of money wouldn’t last very long. 

The thought of running out of cash made him feel sick to his stomach. 

Gathering his bags, he struggled out the door of the diner and out onto the bustling street. At least it was dry and warm today; the last wet patches were clearing from the sidewalks and roads in the rising sun. Maybe he’d go sit in Bryant Park for a while. 

Maybe he’d catch sight of The Burning Man.

***

Two people were dead, three others had third-degree burns and probably wouldn’t recover. 

It hadn’t meant to happen. It wasn’t supposed to become a  _thing_. After that first night, after he’d burned that man who’d tried to take his sleeping spot from him, he’d stayed away from people in general, choosing the most secluded places to camp out and sleep, to hide. He’d used the last of his money to buy a takeaway cup of coffee and enough donuts to last him a week. After that....well. He didn’t know what was going to happen after that. 

Ever since that night, when he’d discovered his....abilities, he’d been both deeply afraid and inexplicably reassured. Whatever it was he could do, it was enough to protect him from the rough, mean streets of New York. On the other hand, the very fact of the matter terrified him. The mugger in Bryant Park, a pick-pocketer he’d spotted trying to steal the wallets of buzzing theater-goers on Broadway, they were both dead because of  _him_ , because he’d lost control of his....powers? Abilities? And burned them both to death. He’d sent blazing balls of fire straight to their chests, incinerating their clothes and charring their skin, and they’d  _died_. 

He had become a killer. A murderer. A  _crazy_  murderer with superpowers who everyone was now calling The Burning Man. 

Blaine was  _scared_. He was scared of himself, scared of what he could do, of how many more people he’d hurt or kill before he regained control of his powers.  _If_  he ever did. 

The only thing he could do now was simply disappear. 

***

Night fell, and brought with it a chilly wind that whipped Kurt’s hair into an unnatural shape as he made his way to a cheap motel he’d found using a quick search in an Internet cafe, the use of which had cost him $10. He’d withdrawn the rest of his cash earlier that afternoon, all $200, and a knot of worry was already forming in his stomach about how long he could afford to stay in even the cheapest, dingiest of motels. The one he’d found wasn’t too shabby-looking, he thought has he pulled up in front of it with his meager luggage, the door and awnings painted forest green and the front a cheerful, pale yellow. In any case, he would have to suck it up, because this was where he would be staying for the next few days at least, until he could figure out his next move. 

He knew that he could just call his dad, or Rachel, or any of his old high-school friends, really, and just  _ask_  for help, but - something was stopping him from picking up his cell. Pride, maybe. A determination to prove that he could get out of this mess on his own. A need to show the world that Kurt Hummel could surmount even the most intractable of odds. 

His determination  _not_  to rely on other people had always been his biggest strength. 

He tried not to think about how it could also become his biggest weakness. 

“Well, Hummel,” he murmured to himself, his voice lost in the rush of wind and the busy honking of taxi cabs and buses and cars on the road behind him, “time to prove to the world once again that you  _can_  come out on top.” 

As he went up to the front door of the motel and pushed it open, he sincerely hoped there were no serial killers hiding out in waiting for the next youthful victim to come along and make a suit out of his skin. 

***

The alley where he slept was cold and damp, but Blaine didn’t feel either as he sat wedged into a corner between two large dumpsters, a blanket he’d taken from a clothes bank draped over his knees. Not that he really needed it; he had learnt that he could raise his body temperature if he so desired, to keep himself warm at night, a steady warmth that spread from his head to his toes and seemed to come from his heart, his veins, as much a part of him as the rest of his body. It was just about the only control he had over his powers. He hadn’t tried to conjure fire again; it was too risky and, in any case, he didn’t want to. 

He’d found himself devouring every piece of news he could find about The Burning Man; avidly scanning newspapers he’d salvaged from trash cans, straining his ears for any snippet of conversation that might hold a comment or an observation about this so-called person. He didn’t really know why. Maybe he just wanted to know what people were saying about him, even though most of it wasn’t positive. And it all made him sound much more impressive than he actually was. They thought he was a menace, a danger, a threat to peaceful society; but all he really was, was scared and alone. 

Maybe if he just knew  _some_ body - anybody - who was like him, someone who could understand the things he had been through and the things he was going through, who knew what was happening to him, it wouldn’t have to be so hard. 

Despite his self-generated heat and newly-increased body temperature, Blaine didn’t sleep well that night. 

Neither did Kurt Hummel.


End file.
